One of the claims we see thrown around fringe literature from time to time, especially among the catastrophists, is that mammoths and mastodons were “flash frozen” in some unspeakable apocalypse that kept them carefully preserved and locked in their freshness. Although surviving wooly mammoth corpses don’t appear to be Ziploc-fresh, the story recurs every few years. For example, David Childress uses them as an example of earth-crust displacement in his Lost Cities & Ancient Mysteries of Africa & Arabia: “Witness woolly mammoths flash-frozen in the Arctic with buttercups in their stomachs. They were apparently flash-frozen in a sliding of the earth’s crust.” Our fringe theorists know the story most directly from Charles Hapgood, who wrote of “edible mammoths steaks” that proved the earth-crust displacement hypothesis. His claim bequeathed our frozen mammoths to fringe history.

However, the most active promoters of the myth were biblical creationists, who hoped to thereby prove that the Flood offed the mammoths. Here’s how catastrophist Donald Patten put it in 1966’s Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, as quoted in H. L. Wilmington’s Guide to the Bible: “Their entombment and refrigeration have been so effective that mammoth carcasses have been thawed to feed sled dogs, both in Alaska and Siberia; in fact, mammoth steaks have even been featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks.” The menus might have read “mammoth,” but they certainly didn’t serve it. I can remember reading about those restaurant menus in old books of strange facts when I was a kid, and the passage I just quoted from Patten above appears all but verbatim in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, cited to Patten.

According to the online version of the Patten text, the source is Ivan T. Sanderson, “Riddle of the Quick-Frozen Giants,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan 16, 1960, p. 82. You will remember Sanderson as the fringe writer whose claims about ancient giants launched David Childress on the path of accusing the Smithsonian of a vast conspiracy. He seems to be an unreliable source, but one who gave more than his share of bad ideas immortality. Hapgood got his information from Sanderson.

Anyway, an offshoot of this claim is the recurring story that some of these mammoths became frozen dinners for European royalty, groups of scientists, or some combination thereof.

I bring this up because of a new report that finds that the most recent of these claims was a hoax. Legend has it that in 1951 the Explorer’s Club served meat from a frozen mammoth, as you can read in this 2014 Mental Floss article that takes the story at least somewhat seriously. But a new analysis of the preserved remains of that dinner (don’t ask why anyone kept the leftovers for 65 years) determined that the food was actually turtle, which had been passed off not as mammoth but as megatherium, an extinct ground sloth. The Christian Science Monitor misunderstood what a megatherium was in 1951 and reported that the food was mammoth, causing the legend.

But this is far from the only mammoth dinner to be little more than hot air. The most popular such dinner allegedly took place shortly after the excavation of the Beresovka mammoth in Russia in 1901. Scientists were rumored to have supped lavishly on the fresh-frozen meat. However, I.P. Tolmachoff looked into the story in 1929 and found that it had been greatly exaggerated. “Although some of flesh recovered from the cadavers were ‘fibrous and marbled with fat’ and looked ‘as fresh as well-frozen beef or horsemeat,’ only dogs showed any appetite for it; ‘the stench . . . was unbearable,’” he wrote in a scholarly article. One scientist tried to taste the meat, but found himself unable to hold down the putrid flesh.

From this, a legend arose that Prof. Otto Herz, who mounted the mammoth for the Tsar’s Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, treated the imperial family to a feast of mammoth flesh, with side dishes brought from archaeological finds around the world, such as preserved grain from Egyptian tombs. While this is a lovely story of the wretched excess of the Romanoff dynasty, it is unfortunately completely untrue.

Nevertheless, the story was popular enough that it took on a life of its own, in various versions. In October 1959, Boy’s Life magazine told its young readers in an article on mammoths that they were frozen solid in blocks of ice. It quoted a college professor, identified only as Elmer, as saying “I once met a man who ate mammoth meat at a banquet of the Czar Nicholas of Russia during the first World War. How do you suppose that happened?”

I suppose it happened because people like to tell tall tales, and some none-too-critical thinkers repeated them from the better part of a century. It never ceases to amaze me how stories keep getting repeated without any fact-checking.

10k year old steaks - I don't care how flash-frozen they might have started as, the freezer burn would be terrible.

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Gary

2/5/2016 12:33:41 pm

How would they react to seeing Buffalo Wings on a menu?

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Only Me

2/5/2016 12:43:11 pm

I can imagine the scenario like this:

"Nigel, I'll give you five quid if you eat some of that."

"... Make it ten and you have a deal."

Really, they should have just added bacon. Everything tastes better with bacon, no exceptions.

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DaveR

2/5/2016 12:55:07 pm

Critical thinking is not a strong trait in the fringe population.

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Time Machine

2/6/2016 02:02:39 am

Hell, there are University Professors who teach one thing and privately believe another. They only do their jobs.

And there are those in the defense department that believe in Remote Viewing.

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KING AND PRIEST LOL

2/6/2016 09:17:12 am

Find a new line, you're boring us.

Time Machine

2/6/2016 09:39:56 am

>>>Critical thinking is not a strong trait in the fringe population<<<

YOU KEEP FORGETTING THAT ALL PERSPECTIVES ARE MERE OPINIONS TO THE FRINGE COOMUNITIES

YOU KEEP FORGETTING THAT

THAT'S WHY WEBSITES AND BLOGS SUCH AS THIS AND THE WHOLE EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT IS WORTHLESS TO THE FRINGE COMMUNITIES

BECAUSE THE FRINGE COMMUNITIES BELIEVE THAT EVERYTHING IS AN OPINION.

Time Machine

2/6/2016 09:42:38 am

>>>Find a new line, you're boring us<<<

Priests and bishops endorsed the public executions of children who stole bread to have something to eat.

One of the reasons of the French Revolution.
To break the yoke on the working classes of Throne and Altar.

Time Machine

2/6/2016 09:53:07 am

>>>Critical thinking is not a strong trait in the fringe population<<<

Nothing can be done about conspiracy theorists.
Not even if you used H-Bombs.

KING AND PRIEST LOL

2/6/2016 10:11:23 am

"Nothing can be done about conspiracy theorists.
Not even if you used H-Bombs."

Uh-huh. I guess so, since you're such a bitch to get rid of.

Jonathan Feinstein

2/5/2016 01:34:30 pm

I was just reading about the Explorer's Club dinner incident this morning. The really amusing bit was that the guy officer the "Giant Sloth" meat actually admitted that it started out as turtle, but that he had a special potion that turned turtle meat into giant sloth meat. That takes the whole gullibility quotient to a new level.

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Clete

2/5/2016 02:02:04 pm

However, we are coming up on Super Bowl weekend. I can picture our ancient ancestors sitting around, watching the game on ancient television sets and eating buffalo wings and pizza made with mammoth. A little ketchup, a little hot sauce makes everything taste edible.

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Jonathan Feinstein

2/5/2016 05:53:17 pm

Well, that would about the time of Super Bowl XX or so. Back in the days of SuperBowl I we were still dining on Brontoburgers and driving cars that used our feet for the accelerators and breaks and had stone rollers instead of wheels and yet inexplicably were capable of turning around corners

The earliest version I'm aware of of the big banquet story (as opposed to a prospector or unnamed native tribe) is in Marshall Gardner's "A Journey to the Earth's Interior." When pressed for a source, Gardener would only say (it was in all the papers a few years back."

As you said, the usual suspect for the mammoth is the Beresovka mammoth in 1901. Björn Kurtén talked to Eugene Pfitzenmayer late in his life. According to him, he and Herz got very drunk one night and began daring each other to eat some. Despite a liberal use of pepper to cover the smell (which could be detected a mile away) he wasn't able to choke any down.

Interestingly, Kurtén did once eat a piece of a frozen Pleistocene animal. This was Blue Babe, a 36,000 year old Steppe Bison found near Fairbanks. This specimen was better frozen than the mammoth and he and R. Dale Guthrie decided to give it a shot. Rather tan just shoving a raw piece into their mouths, they stewed it. This seemed the best way to make it edible as it was desiccated (basically freezer burned). He said it was okay. With enough onions and garlic, any piece of meat can be made edible.

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Scott Hamilton

2/5/2016 02:58:19 pm

Two other things that may to be tied up in the whole Explorer's Club dinner thing:

- The Explorer's Club in the years after the dinner seems to have internalized the CSM's mistake, perhaps because the club was decorated with a mammoth tusk. This was seen as remains of the eaten mammoth.

- Getting back to giant sloths, there were finds of Mylodon skin in 1895 and 1898 in Argentina, so it seemed plausible before radiocarbon dating that there could be living giant sloths around. I wonder if this wasn't what the dinner was referencing.

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Kal

2/5/2016 03:42:46 pm

Mental Floss is a humor site.

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Scott Hamilton

2/5/2016 04:01:28 pm

Mental Floss is a weird news and trivia site with a humorous focus. It isn't a humor site in the sense of the Onion, which regularly make things up.

It's weird the way people's names end up misspelled as stories get told and retold, kind of like the way the Bohemian city ended up becoming Totu at the end of the chain. I'll give him his proper spelling rather than the one from my source.

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David Bradbury

2/5/2016 08:28:35 pm

Sorry, I was meaning to indicate that Henz, in the quoted text, was the variant spelling! He appears to be Alfred Otto Herz, a slightly sidetracked lepidopterist, as indicated in the section "Das Beresowka-Mammut" in this mammoth survey of mammuths:
http://www.grin.com/de/e-book/267615/das-mammut

There's another account of the find in various newspapers from 1903, e.g.:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=37&dat=19030919&id=AQAIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9zUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4058,3836255&hl=en

I just did my own write up of the mammoth feast. I take a more historical approach.
http://mammothtales.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-zombie-mammoth-bites-dust.html

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The Dark Side

2/7/2016 10:48:40 am

yep I for once agree with one of your anti-establishment fringe belief claims Jason...." in fact, mammoth steaks have even been featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks.” The menus might have read “mammoth,” but they certainly didn’t serve it. " ... BEEN THERE - DONE THAT .... and yes, MAMMOTH STEAKS in Fairbanks and ANCORAGE, AK, are super Delicious... tastes just like ELK thou...oddly... ;-)

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About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.